Jay Cutler may very well be an impressive asshole. If you want to call him an asshole, I don’t care. If you want to tell me a story about how you tried to buy him a drink at a bar one time only to have him brush you off; causing you to tell him that he has big stupid double chin, I don’t care. He probably deserved it.
Calling Jay Cutler an asshole does not bother me, what bothers me is the hackneyed vitriol that has been flung at Cutler ever since his disappearing act in the third quarter of last Sunday’s NFC Championship game.
When Cutler left the game with what has now been diagnosed as an MCL sprain and went on to watch his team lose from sidelines, some people didn’t see an injured football player standing in the cold. Some people saw a guy who possesses some kind of deep seeded character flaw.
In his latest column, Whitlock admonishes Cutler not for his lack of toughness, but for his lack of love for The Game. Whitlock opines, “We’re questioning Cutler’s love of the game. A quarterback, a leader, has to love the game.”
Well then I must submit--Mr. Whitlock--that a man of your size, a glutton, has to love diabetes.
In Whitlock’s world, football is only meant to be played by those who truly love The Game, by those who are willing to risk lifelong injury for The Game. The fact that Cutler was unwilling to force his way back onto the field despite his injury means that there is something wrong with him.
Jason Whitlock is full of shit.
But he’s not the only one. Even before Cutler’s injury fiasco, nitwits like Rick Reilly were writing columns questioning Cutler’s value as a human being based on his love of The Game. In a recent column, Reilly cites an instance in which a local reporter asked Cutler what NFL players he idolized as a child, a question to which Cutler replied, “Nobody.” Apparently Cutler’s answer gave little Ricky Reilly the vapors, so much so that Reilly had to go all bitchcakes on us and write something as dense as, “If he’s lying, it makes him a miscreant. If he’s telling the truth, it makes him a miscreant.”That’s right folks, Jay Cutler is a faulty human being because when he was a child he didn’t spend his nights jerking it to a poster of John Elway.
…….
Hey YOU! Yeah, you, person reading this blog post. What do you do for a living? What are you like a computer programmer or something? Oh really? That’s cool, lucky guess! Anyway, what computer programmers did you idolize as a child? What’s that!? You didn’t idolize any programmers as a child! YOU DO NOT POSSESS ENOUGH REVERENCE FOR THE HISTORY OF YOUR PROFESSION! YOU ARE A TERRIBLE PERSON!
…….
Oh, sorry about that, I think I may have gone completely psychotic for a second there. Yep, I definitely did.
The point is simply this: in the real world Jay Cutler is in no way obligated to love the sport that he plays. He is nothing more than a guy with a cannon for an arm and the ability to hit an open receiver (well, at least some of the time). Maybe Cutler just doesn’t like football as much as we do, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. After all, he’ll probably only be able to play the game for a half dozen or so more years before his body breaks down and he has to start wearing Depends.
Cutler plays football because he can use his athletic gifts to make a living. That’s it. That’s all there is to it, and he doesn’t owe anyone any more of an explanation than that. He doesn’t have to conform to people like Whitlock and Reilly’s image of what a quarterback should be; and the fact that they get so angry at him for not doing so really says a lot more about them than it does about Cutler.
Just because Whitlock and Reilly love The Game enough to use it as their platform to spout off crappy sports columns that feature race baiting and bad tooth puns, (seriously, google “Rick Reilly tooth jokes” sometime) doesn’t mean that Cutler has to love it too.
You don’t have to love your job in order to do it effectively, and neither does Jay Cutler.
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1 comments:
We DID see a Jay Cutler vulnerable enough to show that he does love the game in his press conference (I refuse to call it a "presser") when he started to break down and cry. He was under attack for the first time in his career not by the known force of the media, but from the supposed brotherhood of the NFLPA members.
January 28, 2011 at 8:17 PMYou are dead right to attack these two hacks who have cowardly refused to ditch the due diligence of journalistic integrity prior to attempting to demolish a man's career.
Sound like the work of paparazzi without a camera and replaced with a pen? Welcome to the New Media--twits with a Twitter account and dummies with smart phones. Afraid to get beat out of their work by the net high school sophomore looking for his 15 minutes of fame before he learns to ask "Would you like fries with that?"
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